Has any artist ever been paid so much or been so well-known yet had so little to say as the late, limpid, loony Andy Warhol? If there's any doubt in your mind, read "The Andy Warhol Diaries."
For 807 pages (which we're told were culled from 20,000 manuscript pages - a horrifying thought), Warhol goes on and on and on and on and on about (1) money, (2) his social life and (3) how he makes money from his social life. There may be some other topics, but I really don't recall. Art? Get outta here."Wednesday, November 22, 1978: The big news for the past two days is the mass suicide in Guyana of a cult led by somebody named Jim Jones . . .. They'd put cyanide in grape-flavored Kool-Aid. (laughs) Just think, if they'd used Campbell's Soup I'd be so famous. I'd be on every news show, everyone would be asking me about it . . ."
I confess that I was only able to get through a few hundred pages; my mind was fast reaching a Zenlike state of perfect emptiness, and I had to stop.
The endless recitation of glitzy names - Liza and Liz and Bianca and Mick and Halston and Madonna and Jackie O. and Truman and Tama, ad nauseum - is hypnotic, in a way, in that none of the events or people are particularly interesting or amusing. But this manic mantra just keeps on and on from Nov. 24, 1976, to Feb. 17, 1987, five days before his death.
No pretense is attempted to portray Warhol as a modern-day Pepys, either. As Pat Hackett, his longtime assistant and confidant and the tireless editor of these mindless meanderings, writes in the introduction:
"A written communication from Andy was a rarity. You'd often see him holding a pen and his hand would be moving, but it was almost always just to sign his name, be it as an autograph or on a work of art or at the bottom of a contract."
Instead, Warhol would call her every day and describe what he'd done the previous day. She would type it up and send it over to his office, where the manuscript would be filed away.
"This account of daily activity came to have the larger function of letting Andy examine life," Hackett writes. "In a word, it was a diary. But whatever its broader objective, its narrow one, to satisfy tax auditors, was always on Andy's mind."
She's not kidding. The casual notations of expenses - `At 9:00 cabbed to Fred's ($2.25) . . ." - are omnipresent, providing a nutty continuity of sorts. Warhol's avariciousness is cruelly, unknowingly hilarious at times.
For example, the entry for Sunday, April 17, 1977, begins: "Went to church and while I was kneeling and praying for money a shopping-bag lady came in and asked me for some. She asked for $5 and then upped it to $10 . . . I gave her a nickel."
Another thread of continuity is the cattiness of the gossip, from which no one is immune. Sex, drugs, parties, looks, habits, finances - nothing and no one is sacred. Friendship and (dare we speak its name in such rarified circles?) love are for all intents and purposes unknown quantities.
In fact, the only passion Warhol seemingly can muster, other than for himself and for money, is for his dachshunds Archie and Amos. And yet he notes (March 13, 1984): ". . . The dog had peed on my bed and I beat him up. Amos."
Poor, pathetic Andy. One wonders whether Archie and Amos grieve for him.